


All Cats are Grey in the Dark

by SharpestRose



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-01
Updated: 2011-11-01
Packaged: 2017-10-25 15:07:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/271650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharpestRose/pseuds/SharpestRose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ciel and Sebastian make do as best they can. Contains spoilers for the end of the second anime series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Cats are Grey in the Dark

Ciel's first soul comes into his possession quite by accident. 

They are in Russia, because he'd set a globe spinning and then prodded it with his finger to stop the movement, and the place his finger hit was Russia. 

There is a rockfall on a narrow road, a carriage destroyed, and on the periphery of Ciel's damnation-sharp hearing there is a voice screaming "please, God, anyone, please save my baby."

He has sent Sebastian off on some errand, a pointless quest for which he has forgotten the specifics, and so Ciel goes to the scene of the accident alone.

It's a father and a daughter, the girl only four or five years old. Her hair is a dark chestnut and braided into a coil, and the freckles on her upturned nose remind Ciel of Lizzie. The two girls are nothing alike, really, and yet he is still reminded.

Ah, well. Maybe demons are capable of sentimentality after all. Alois had been certain of it. Ciel had thought him a fool for it. 

The father is elderly, old enough to be the child's grandfather. He does not flinch at the sight of Ciel and the bargain is efficiently struck. The girl is already unconscious from a knock to the head. Everything is orderly and perfect. Almost as if it had been deliberately arranged. 

Ciel's eyes narrow at the thought, but there is no stamp of his butler's handiwork on this scene. Just the pure dumb chaotic luck of humanity. 

The man's soul is cold and tart, like the memory of lemon sorbet. Ciel can taste the death of the man's first wife, and the shattering grief which followed. They'd had no children and he had been so alone in the aftermath of her loss. He had wanted to die. His agony is wretched and delicious. Ciel's fingers tighten on the man's arms, his hands opening and closing in spasms, like a mockery of a hungry baby enraptured by milk from a breast.

A second wife, much younger. Surely she would outlive him and save him from being alone. A daughter, born as a second insurance against this fate occurring. Complications in the birth. One companion lost, another gained. A zero-sum game. And now: victory. He has died before Varvara. 

Ciel sits back, his meal completed. His heart is hammering in his chest and his limbs are shaking, overfull of sensation. He curls onto his side on the cold ground and moans without meaning to, then flinches from the sound. It reminds him too much of the grunts and squeals that people make during sex. He never wants to make those noises himself. Not for anything. 

He has to lie still for a little while. Just until he is used to this. 

He wonders if the man felt agony at the extraction of his soul. Ciel expects so; it's his experience that any transaction which feels as good for one party as this did for him is invariably horrendous for the other. That's just how the world works, nothing demonic or divine about it.

Varvara has a broken leg and several shattered ribs, and a bruise rising on her forehead. Ciel carries her back to the hotel suite, since his clothes are ruined with dirt and blood anyway.

Sebastian has returned from his errands. If he is surprised by the state Ciel's in, he doesn't show it. He simply goes to draw a bath for the little girl and phones for a physician to come and treat her injuries. 

Ciel does not bother to undress before climbing up onto his bed, curling once again onto his side. He's not nauseous, but the sensation is reminiscent of that. His guts feel as if they are roiling. 

"I will attend to you as soon as possible, young Master," Sebastian says smoothly from somewhere near the door. Ciel doesn't open his eyes to look. The door closes with a soft click, and Ciel is alone for a time. 

Allowing his powers to spark up only makes it worse, so he lies slack instead, and simply waits. 

After an eternity the door opens, the mattress dips with added weight, and Sebastian's ungloved fingers touch Ciel's chin, turning his face up to the light. Ciel opens his eyes, the eyepatch askew from his twisting and turning. 

"Such a large meal in such a young belly." Sebastian's voice is honeyed smoothness as it mocks. He hasn't used such a teasing tone since before Ciel died. Ciel's heart twists, hot and melancholy, at the sound. 

"I didn't know that bitter rabbits remembered the art of banter," he retorts, forcing himself up into a half-sitting position against the pillows. 

"Hm?" Sebastian asks, the very picture of noncommittal diplomacy. His shirtsleeves are rolled to the elbows, his vest and coat discarded. He's been helping the doctor with the child, then.

"You've been as sullen as the end of the world for some time now," Ciel explains. "I wondered how long you were going to sulk before you got tired of it."

Sebastian looks away, his newly habitual misery returning to his expression. Ciel frowns in disappointment. "You aren't tired of it yet, then."

"That man had a complex and nuanced core," Sebastian says. His hand touches Ciel's jaw again, then his cheek. "For a demon as young as you, who hasn't even known true hunger yet, that's more soul than you can comfortably eat. That's why you're feeling ill."

"It feels disgusting. Like it's writhing inside me," Ciel says flatly. "How long will it last?"

"The feeling will fade in a week or two." 

Sebastian's eyes meet his again, and there's a moment of connection, of shared predicament. Ciel's ever-present loneliness wavers at its edges. 

"I didn't ask for it. It wasn't... this was a revenge Alois thought up against us both. I played no part in it."

Sebastian drops his hand from Ciel's face, but Ciel catches his wrist and forces him to stay as he was. 

"Was our dance truly so tiresome for you?" he asks, and hates himself for how raw the question sounds. 

Sebastian's eyes widen a little in surprise. "Young Master?"

"Do you think I make you serve me empty cups from empty pots to mock you? Have I ever struck you as so frivolous before?" Ciel snaps. His anger distracts from the worst of the discomfort. "Idiot."

How to explain that those little rituals, the daily routines of waking and dressing and discussing useless things like tea aromas, had been the only rope mooring Ciel to sanity for a long time? That there would have been precious little soul for Sebastian to covet, without those small certainties? 

And now, with his humanity gone, those routines were literally all Ciel had left of the person he had been. 

He hates himself for feeling so weak. Alois would be laughing at him for it. Ciel turned out to be the most useless and needy of them all.

"Is gobbling me up the only thing I was good for?" Ciel asks now in a mutter. There are so many other things he wants to snap, to ask in plaintive rage. Can't a soul be savoured through simple company? Was there no pleasure in the playing of the game, only in the thought of the victory to come? Doesn't Sebastian know that, at the end, the only reason Ciel was keeping himself alive at all was to offer up what he knew Sebastian wanted so dearly?

But he doesn't say them. There'd be no point in saying them. 

Sebastian probably knows every word of every unspoken shout anyway. He has always been able to read Ciel better than Ciel has been able to read him.

"How is the girl?" Ciel asks.

"Resting."

"I was thinking I might arrange to have her live on the estate. Those imbeciles will probably be happier if they've got someone to fuss over," Ciel says, though he can't find it in himself to genuinely care one way or another if his former servants are content. They are less than mayflies to him now. Shadows on a windowpane. The only reason he feels anything stronger than this for the girl, for Varvara, is because he is obligated to do so by the contract.  
Sebastian is staring at him. Ciel glares back, determined not to waste what has become so rare. "What?"

"There are tendrils of his soul around you. Against your skin, caught in your hair. I can smell it on your breath when you speak," Sebastian replies.

"Is it so different from what my own was that you can't stand it?" Ciel asks, genuinely curious. "Or are all cats grey in the dark?"

Sebastian's gaze is still locked with Ciel's. "I think another axiom may suit the situation better," he says. "When what is lost cannot be regained, we must make do with what is left."

Ciel wonders if Sebastian has taken anyone's soul since Ciel died. They've had their contract with one another almost four years now. If Sebastian hasn't sought nourishment elsewhere, he must be hungry by now. Was he planning to go on like that forever, starving himself, eternally mourning the soul that slipped through his grasp like a darting fish in dark water? If that's the case, then sentimentality is proving to be a common malady among demons.

"Take it. I don't want it. It makes me ill," Ciel demands.

Sebastian leans in, his eyes flaring to their luminous, wicked form. Ciel's own eyes spark in response. They are two of a kind. They've always been two of a kind.

"Yes, my lord," Sebastian says. Their mouths fit together, cold skin to cold skin, and then Sebastian _inhales_.

If devouring a human's soul had been akin to a baby sucking greedily at milk, then passing that same soul from one side of their covenant to the other is an altogether darker, wilder sensation. Ciel whimpers, hands grabbing at Sebastian's shoulders to push him away or pull him closer, to do something, Ciel doesn't know what. He simply knows that he cannot lie passive, that one of his hands must grab at Sebastian's hair and pull, that his back arches when Sebastian presses down against him.

He'd been afraid it would be like sex. Ciel doesn't like sex, doesn't like anything about it. If not for his pride, he would say that he found sex a horrifying and fearful concept entirely. He loves Lizzie and always has, but there have been moments when he'd think of the intimacy she'd expect after their marriage, the family they were supposed to create together, and his skin would go cold and prickle, and there would been a rush of howling wind in his head. No amount of obligation could ever make him anything less than terrified.

But it's not like sex. It's nothing at all like sex. It's like death.

Ciel has never been afraid of death.

The feeling spirals higher and higher, each wave of intensity more than Ciel thinks he can stand. He is growling, a sound no human could make, and Sebastian is answering him in that same primal language of evil and hunger. They cling to one another and Ciel wonders if this moment, this connection between them, is any consolation to Sebastian for the loss of his prized prey.

When the man's soul is gone, Ciel feels hollowed and exhausted. He has not been this tired since before his death.

Sebastian breaks the kiss between them, resting his forehead against Ciel's own. "Young Master," he says, and if the notion wasn't absurd Ciel would say it sounded like a prayer.

Ciel sleeps for a time, after that. He isn't sure how long, but when he wakes his room is lit by candle-light. Sebastian is sitting at the writing desk, working despite the dimness. If anything, they see better in the dark than they do in brightness.

"She reminded me of Lizzie," Ciel says, not bothering to sit up. "When I first saw her."

"You miss the Lady Elizabeth very much," Sebastian says. It isn't a question. Ciel makes a small noise of assent in his throat.

"If I may be bold, young Master -"

"When are you ever otherwise?"

"- but I feel it is worth reminding you that the Lady Elizabeth loves you deeply, and would be pleased to hear from you. You will discover, in time, that human lives are extremely brief. The dead are dead for a very long time."

Ciel frowns. "But what could I possibly expect her to do, when she grows up and I do not?"

"What did you do, when you returned from your ordeal?" Sebastian counters. "You knew then that you'd seen into depths of darkness that she likely never would. Did that stop you from wanting to be near her, the fact you had grown up and she had not?"

"Do demons take human lovers, then?"

Sebastian nods. "On occasion."

"And?" Ciel prompts.

"It ends badly."

Ciel decides not to bother with asking who, exactly, it ends badly for. There's no answer which would be a comfort. And anyway, Ciel has always cared as much about the playing of a game as he has about the ultimate outcome.  
Perhaps he will write to Lizzie. Perhaps not. He can decide later. He has a little time, at least. He closes his eyes.

"Wake me in the morning, Sebastian."

It may be Ciel's imagination, but he thinks he can hear a smile in the reply.

"Yes, my lord."

 

 

 

 


End file.
